


If I Have to Walk the World (I Promise)

by Ocean_Born_Mary



Series: Forever (I Promise) [1]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: AU, Angst, F/M, Future Fic, M/M, Multi, OT3, Reincarnation, Slash, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-28
Updated: 2014-07-28
Packaged: 2018-02-10 19:55:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2037978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ocean_Born_Mary/pseuds/Ocean_Born_Mary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’d stumbled from that bar only a few minutes before, determined to end it.  Tonight the wine had not been enough to drown out the self-loathing and Thomas was calling too loudly from below.  </p><p>Or…in which no matter how much time we have, wounds do not heal and love does not die.  How many chances will we be given to live life over again?</p>
            </blockquote>





	If I Have to Walk the World (I Promise)

**Author's Note:**

> Ahem…
> 
> So. Here in the US we've only had five episodes so far (which has NOT stopped me from pre-ordering a dvd), but which does mean that I'm a little behind on the times and may be missing very important information. Sigh. 
> 
> This is an AU fic. I couldn't stand the thought that the boys wouldn't be together after death…and have developed a taste for hurting Athos. So, here we go. Let me know if you think it needs a sequel/prequel/additional snapshots, or if you want to play in the sandbox with me! (I'd love if someone else took the idea and did a different take, or even added on or…I'll shut up now).
> 
> The song is "The Promise" by When in Rome, Circa 1988. 
> 
> Enjoy!

            “Michael!  Michael!”

            It’s 1975 and the world is silently locked in a Cold War.

            But Michael won’t stop screaming.

            He doesn’t know how to explain to the woman in front of him ( _his mother,_ part of his brain insists, _not his mother_ , another whispers) what he has seen, the horror inside of his head.

            She’s rocking him and shushing him but he’s still screaming, fingers digging into his scalp, pulling at the short tufts of hair ( _so much shorter than it should be_ ) with hands too small for the person he is in his sleep.

            “Hush, honey, it was just a dream, just a dream…”

            Eventually, he calms, his brain shutting down into nothingness ( _it would shut down faster with a drink_ , something slyly hints, but what do eight-year-olds know of wine and whiskey?), and realizes that the woman behind him is sobbing, desperate little hiccups of relief.  His throat hurts, but his mind is foggy.  In the thin band of moonlight that slips from under his curtains, Michael studies his hands.  So tiny, so smooth. His hands in the dream had been rough and calloused, scarred from a myriad of little nicks and covered in the blood of someone he was sure he must have loved.  But what does a child know of love?  He lets his mother continue to smother him ( _yes, this must be his mother)_ , but refuses to sleep the rest of the night. 

            He makes it two nights, dreaming of a brother that doesn’t exist, who climbs trees with him and splashes in streams. His brother calls him Olivier and looks up at him with adoring eyes. They steal loaves of bread and wheels of hard cheese from a kitchen so old it belongs in a castle, run wild in the woods near the towering mansion that seems so strangely familiar. Together, they sneak a horse from the stables, try to ride it bareback, and when caught, he takes the punishment and urges his brother to run before they see him.  Later, his backside is aching, but they are still laughing about the look on the stable master’s face when the man saw him hanging by the horse’s tail, his face firmly planted in the poor stallion’s arse as he tried not to fall.

            But then the blood is back, he’s drowning in it, and Michael is screaming. 

            His father, who has seen too much blood of his own in Vietnam, comes thundering in, not quite drunk enough to pass out, but far too drunk to see out of his own suffering if his mother’s black eye is anything to go by.  She’s following behind him, begging. “Fred, Fred, he’s just a boy.  He’s just a boy…”

            “I’ll give him something to scream about, Janie! He doesn’t have any reason to scream, but I’ll give him one!  I’ll give him one!”

            Ironically, the broken arm does not make Michael cry.  When he’s sitting in the emergency room, and the doctors are looking at his shattered bone and his mother’s black eye and they’re asking all kinds of questions about his father, Michael just says that he got up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water and slipped on the baseball he’d left at the top of the stairs.

            He doesn’t understand why his mother is looking at him with grateful eyes.

            Michael just knows that Thomas is dead and that somehow, he is to blame.  So he takes the pounding in his arm as penance and vows to never sleep again.

            Of course this lasts only until the next evening.

            He goes into school with a bruise on his face and the feel of a noose closing around his neck.  Smells the sweet scent of Forget-Me-Nots in his teacher’s perfume and vomits in the trashcan in the front of the whole third grade.

            Michael has grown old overnight, has seen suffering and death.

            He is no longer a child.

            Eventually, his friends pull away. No one wants to hang out with the boy who stares blankly through them.  No one wants to be with the child who startles at the slightest touch, whirls without thinking to pummel with fists, certain that there is cold steel at his throat.  No one wants to hang around the weirdo who knows the answers to any question a teacher asks, could multiply, add, divide, perform advanced algebra out of the blue.

            Michael’s teachers call home, praising him as a savant.  They want him to skip grades, offer to send home extra work, suggest that he take classes at the local college.  His mother can’t afford them, even though she works all day as a secretary for a large law firm (she has bruises at her throat sometimes, and her hair will be messy, her lipstick smeared when she comes home—but by then his father has had too much sauce— _the best cure, for a hangover son, is to keep drinking_ —to notice) and she wants him to be a _normal_ child.  No skipping grades for him.

            So Michael’s teachers call for other reasons.

            “He isn’t buying lunch.” _Because I don’t have the money for it this week, honey,_ she told him, _Silly boy forgot his money again_ , she’d giggle into the phone _._ It didn’t matter, most days Michael can’t stand to eat anyway.

            “Michael’s finger is broken and he’s limping. He said he fell down the stairs again?” _Such a clumsy child.  He asked to go out for baseball, but his father and I are just so worried he’ll hurt himself_. Which is why he starts doing training exercises in the dark of the night.  Michael’s mind seems to know what to do, even if his limbs don’t, and he’s glad to watch muscle build—even if it is thin and corded and nothing like he remembers.  Maybe if he works hard enough, is exhausted enough, he won’t dream. 

            Eventually the teachers quit calling.

            On the day that Michael turns ten, he realizes that there is something deeply, undeniably wrong with him. 

            Michael doesn’t bring in treats like the other kids. His bellbottoms are worn hand-me-downs from the neighbor next door, covered in mud from the bank of the stream two blocks from his house where he likes to sit and pretend that it is a cool, clear, rushing river that winds its way through a loud, noisy city of stone. He’s let his hair grow, and it curls softly around his ears.  He may be ten but his eyes are ancient, dark blue flint set in pale skin. So there is no one that would eat cupcakes his mother baked for his birthday—even if his father hadn’t spent all the money his mother had saved for them on a six-pack and a bottle of Kentucky Bourbon.  Michael doesn’t hold it against his father.  He understands the desire to block out the demon crawling up inside, and so the broken rib is not an unwelcome birthday present.

            He turns ten in silence and goes to school, no one any wiser to him entering this new, strange, double-digit world.

            “Michael,” this one’s name is Mrs. Cragen. She has blue hair in tight curls and smells like mold.  The rumor is that she has been teaching so long that she is decaying in the classroom.

            “Oui, Madame?”  Michael always responds with the proper “Yes, M’am”.  He doesn’t know why, but just feels, that on some level, he is supposed to treat everyone with respect—even if they don’t deserve it.

            Mrs. Cragen rolls her eyes and sighs. Michael doesn’t pay attention but always gets the answer right, and it rankles her nerves.  No child should be that smart.  He sets a poor example for the rest of his class, gazing out the window when he should be taking detailed notes about the French monarchies that they are learning about.  When she calls home about it she catches his father in a surprisingly sober frame of mind.

            “He doesn’t pay attention at all!”

            “Are his grades slipping?” asked the rough voice on the other end.

            “No, but it is disrespectful…”

            “Is he answering questions wrong?”

            “No, but…”

            “Has he said something towards you?”

            “No.”

            “Then don’t call again.”

            The click and the buzz of the empty line clearly showed where this child’s impudence came from.  She doesn’t see what is on the other end of the phone line, how Michael is peering around the doorframe.  They haven’t had money for beer (or something stronger) in nearly a week, and dried out his father is a reasonable man.  A good man.  His eyes smile as he quirks his lips and drapes a heavy arm around Michael’s shoulder. “Don’t let her bother you, kiddo. She’s just jealous of those brains.” Here is a man Michael could love.

            His mother comes home an hour later, smelling of someone else’s cologne.  Michael’s father pawns the silverware, comes home smelling like the bar on 5th and Walnut Street. Michael bites hard on his tongue that night, to keep himself from screaming. 

            So, when Michael answers her in French during History class, Mrs. Cragen is certain that he’s just being a smart-ass.

            “Michael, which Monarch was married to Anne of Austria?” 

            _There’s shouting in the prison yard, gunpowder and ringing steel.  He’s yelling to protect the queen.  But it is alright, someone that he trusts with his own life has her, she is safe.  He has not failed his Captain.  He has not failed his King. But as the young boy walks away with the man who may yet bring down the monarchy, he cannot help the stab of fear that pierces his heart.  He isn’t sure that he trusts this boy yet.  It still waits to be seen._

            “Sa Majesté la Reine Anne, reine consort de la France était mariée à Louis XIII à l'âge de 14 ans.”

            There is silence in the room. Mrs. Cragen is staring at him, open-mouthed.  He doesn’t know what he has done wrong now.  Michael has not screamed. He does not have any visible bruises (his rib will be fine until this evening, when he walks in on the wrong end of a week-long bender).  He has just answered the question.

            “Dude,” it’s Bobby, who likes Stretch Armstrong and watching wrestling and saying the word ‘dude’ and who used to be his friend before Michael started screaming and doing quadratic equations in his head ( _because he’s done this all before_ ) three years ago.  “Now you speak French?”

            “Non,” Michael denies.  He doesn’t understand.  He’s speaking English, isn’t he?  _Tous por un et un pour tous,_ something cruel inside him whispers.  Michael bolts from the classroom, down to the stream, bends over with his head between his knees and screams and screams and screams.  It’s late fall and snow is already threatening New Jersey, but Michael stays there shivering in the mud until it grows dark.

            His mother is tear streaked and there are flashing lights outside his house.

            The broken rib is for making her worry, but really it is for bringing trouble into the house.  Maybe if either of them had ever paid any attention, they’d have realized that Michael spent all his time at the stream.  But instead when the school called and said that Michael had run out of class do you know where he might have gone, they had to say ‘No, no idea.’

            Luckily his bout of speaking unwanted French seems to have disappeared, and when it comes time to pick a language two years later he stubbornly picks Spanish, certain that he can avoid trouble that way. It is no use, because the voice that has been whispering the Lord’s Prayer in his ear apparently is speaking Spanish. He tests out of the class on the first day and French on the second.  They try to stick him in Latin, but it is no use, so instead he ends up with a study hall during the third block of the day.

            He wishes he were in class instead.

            During high school his dreams change.

            Up until this point they have been of Thomas (the brother that he sometimes looks for in that empty third bedroom or at the top of an apple tree—the brother that he fully expects to find splashing in the stream, to turn around and gesture and call him _Olivier_ as if he has known him all his life) and of a young woman that he calls _Milady_.  She likes small blue flowers and to run through the fields. Milady can run forever and ever. No matter how hard he runs, Michael can never catch her.  Can never save her. Save them. 

            Now, though, he’s on top of her, and they’re by the bank of the stream, that happy, babbling stream, hidden by the bushes. He’s told Thomas that he has lots of work to do today, that he must study for the tutor’s exams, but in reality he’s fumbling with the laces on her corset, trying to release the prize that must be inside.  Her eyes are dark and she’s writhing under him, urging him to hurry, now, please. Just as he’s lowering his head to take in her breast there’s a rustling in the blueberry bush and he see’s Thomas’ wide eyes.  He chases after his brother, to explain what happens between a man and woman and does not see the anger flash in her countenance as he leaves her half dressed and unsatiated on the shore.

            Michael wakes hard and aching for her.

            And so when she dies, the noose around her neck, the next night (as he’s seen so many times before) the horror of what has happened rends him into a thousand tiny pieces.  His father finds him, lips to the bottle of rum from behind the glass cabinet. Instead of beating him senseless, as Michael expects, he nods and walks away.  Michael isn’t sure what his father saw on his face, but realizes, horrified, that he’s walking in the shadow of a man that he wants so badly to not become. So he puts the bottle back and when he wakes, aching, for a drink or panting with a desire that can never be fulfilled, he drops to his knees and whispers,

 

“Padre nuestro, que estás en los cielos,

Santificado sea tu Nombre.

Venga tu reino.

Hágase tu voluntad en la tierra,

Como está en el cielo.

Danos hoy nuestro pan de cada día.

Y perdónanos nuestras deudas,

Como nosotros perdonamos a los que nos ofenden.

Y no nos dejes caer en la tentación,

Mas líbranos del mal.

Porque tuyo es el reino,

El poder y la gloria,

Por los siglos de los siglos.

Amén”

 

            He repeats it in French and English and Latin, sometimes in German and Arabic and Hebrew, but always goes back to Spanish, letting the “Our Fathers” fill the night and take away a little of the emptiness inside. 

            Bobby grows to be a head and a half taller than Michael and twice as broad.  He’s a linebacker and a bully.  He’s long since replaced the word ‘dude’ with more colorful and offensive vocabulary. 

            But that doesn’t stop Michael when he finds Bobby pressing a crying freshman girl into the boy’s locker room, hand already up her skirts. 

            “Let her go, Bobby.”

            “You want a little piece, Michael?” he asks, shaking her body as if it is nothing more than a ragdoll. “Only way you’re ever gonna get it, you freak.  Come on, you know you want a taste…” 

            His vision darkens and the world narrows down to just him and Bobby.  Michael isn’t sure what happens next, but muscle memory seems to take over. He’s fought opponents bigger than this one and won.  Hears a voice whisper in his ear, _“If they’re as tall and broad as me, you have to get them off balance.”_

            It shouldn’t be this easy, but it is.

            His vision clears and Bobby is unconscious, dark bruise already blooming across his cheekbone. The young girl, Connie is her name, thanks him and hugs him and presses a kiss to his cheek, but her lips are too delicate, too soft and small.  Michael finds himself longing for chapped lips and rough stubble. He isn’t sure why.

            A week later, when the offensive line of the football team corners him behind the bleachers, Michael manages to take down almost half of them before he goes down. He’s certain if there had been just one more person there by his side, they’d never have gotten him.

Michael turns seventeen, only has a year left in this small, god-forsaken town, and his dreams change again.  He’s toyed with the idea of therapy for years, but as he watches Milady kill Thomas again and again, sentences her to die even though he’s being torn to tiny pieces, he cannot stand himself anymore. Looking back on the dreams ( _not dreams_ ), he should have understood that this was how it all ends (he’s known that they die, known it for years, has woken up screaming since he was a child, but he’d never known, he’d never KNOWN), and he hates himself.  His despair is so deep that he craves something to obliterate it, himself, thinks longingly towards the well stocked liquor shelf (his father doesn’t drink as much now, he’s turned yellow around the eyes and thin as a rail, his father rarely even gets out of bed now), and instead heads out into the thunderstorm.

The stream has swollen into a rushing river, and three blocks down a bridge crosses over it.  The small trickle of water is now halfway up the rocks—they’ll have an honest-to-god flood tonight. 

But Michael isn’t going to be around to see it.

He climbs up on the wet rock wall, no one is dumb enough to be outside in a storm like this.  Branches litter the ground from the wind and Michael is soaked to the skin, but he still feels dirty.

It’s his fault that his brother his dead. His fault that the woman ( _my wife_ ) is dead. Michael closes his eyes and pictures Thomas’ smiling face.  Smells warm bread just out of the oven, feels it burn his skin as he slides it under his shirt and they run, giggling from the kitchens.  He sees a little boy grow into a strong, kind man.  They have spent days in the sun and wind and rain, nights under the stars.  They have learned to ride and hunt together, learned to read and write under the eye of a tutor who held them imprisoned in the library on only the clearest of days. Together they learned to wield a sword, to play an instrument (Thomas preferred the piano, but he _Olivier_ loved the violin), to play pranks on the grumpy old stable master. 

Michael lifts his foot, leans forward, smiles as he sees Thomas beckon him (there is so much to do, so much to see, Olivier look what I’ve found!), and freezes.  He can feel a strong hand on the back of his neck, squeezing hard enough to leave bruises.  The air comes out of his lungs in a rush and he notices for the first time that he’s soaked.

The water rushing below him is not the tiny stream from a backwater town in New Jersey.  This river is normally clean, calm, but tonight it is angry, demanding blood. The stone wall is lit by covered lanterns, but most of the flames have gone out, blown asunder in the wind, and the bridge is dark.  The sounds of shouts from the bar a half block away are drowned out by the hail pounding the cobblestones.  He’d stumbled from that bar only a few minutes before, determined to end it. Tonight the wine had not been enough to drown out the self-loathing and Thomas was calling too loudly from below.

“ _You jump, and I swear to God,”_ the voice hisses in his ear, “ _I swear to God, Athos that I will fish you out and I will tear you limb from limb.”_

            Michael finds himself pressed against the crumbling wall, back on the bridge above New Jersey. “I promise,” he sobs, arms around his knees and head buried between them as he rocks back and forth, back and forth. “I promise, I promise. Oh God, Porthos, I promise.”

            When he comes home, dripping puddles on to the linoleum, his mother snaps at him to clean it up. She has a cigarette in one hand and a scotch in the other.  She hasn’t bothered trying to hide the bruises on her neck, has probably rubbed the hicky in her husband’s face.  Michael understands, on a much deeper level, what that desire to hurt can do to a person. Saw what it did to Milady. Sees what it is doing to this woman who he no longer believes is his mother.  So he mops up the tile and goes to his room and prays.

            That night he dreams of men, two of them.

            They are closer than brothers, more than mere lovers.  They are what is missing in his soul. 

            He sees Aramis’ quicksilver smile, feels Porthos’ strong, but oh so gentle, hands.

            In the span of one night he sees a lifetime of brotherhood.  They fight and bleed and live for each other.  He drinks.  A lot. But these dreams do not seem as dark as the ones that have proceeded them, because Michael feels that they must end up alright.

            He reads Dumas, looks for references to these Musketeers, and thinks he must be insane. These people in the book are not those he sees in his dreams.  That Porthos is not the one whose stubble left burns across his back as he pressed in from behind.  That Aramis is not the one with clever hands and quick wit, who pieced him back together night after night that he had fallen apart.  These are not the men in his dreams ( _memories_ ) who faced down countless criminals, who bandaged countless wounds, who carried him home when he could no longer stand.  Who, when the world got to be too much for him, would help him drink himself into oblivion and never held it against him when he didn’t seem to heal. This is not the Captain he remembers. The King that he served. The Cardinal may be just as underhanded, but it is still not the same. He does not understand, but the next time he goes to throw himself from a bridge Michael remembers that he made a promise, and walks back home. 

            “I promise to never leave you,” Porthos whispers one night, when he’s alone in the dark. It was a promise delivered in the depths of the night, when Athos shows up on his doorstep.  He’d dreamt of Porthos dying in his arms, woke up retching and had to see for himself that the other man is alive.

            Remembers that first time they are together.  He’d been ready to bury himself in the warmth of a stranger, to try and drown out her memory in a seedy room above the bar.  But the door had burst open and the woman had fled.  “If you need something,” Aramis was angry, so angry, “you come to us first. If you need a friend. If you are in doubt. If you are in danger, we will be there. Do you understand me?” Aramis has him by the shoulders, is shaking him.

            “Promise,” it is the only word Athos speaks on the matter.

            “We promise,” Porthos says from the shadows of the doorway.  “If we have to walk the world to find you, I promise you that we will be there.”

            So he lets them take him apart and put him together.  And never looks back. 

            He sees Milady in his house. He’s quarreled with Aramis and wishes that it was his brothers that pull him from the flames.  It’s a boy, a smooth-faced boy who reminds him too much of Thomas that pulls him from the flames.  He knows he should tell the others, but instead just apologizes. Aramis is still angry, but it is Porthos who sees the burns.  He cannot find the words to tell them, feels it would be disloyal to them…to her. They’ve never complained about the fact that he still wears the locket when he is in their bed, but he thinks that soon, soon, he’ll have to give it away.  Clearly he’s losing his mind. 

            But Michael sees what Athos does not (knows in the very back of his mind that she is alive).

            It works out, until the end.

            The night that Aramis and Porthos die Michael screams.  He hasn’t screamed for years.  His father is too frail now to hit him, but his mother thunders in, because her boyfriend is in the living room (really?  In the house while his father lays on his death bed) and he’s going to think that her son is insane. But Michael screams because for all that he loved Thomas and Milady, he understands now, understands…

            His soul has been ripped apart, pieces fluttering over a bloody battlefield.  Porthos’ head is in his arms, Aramis’ lays on his thigh. Aramis was gone before he hit the ground, the blood and brain matter that is leaking onto well oiled leather is a testament to that.  But Porthos is going slowly, too many wounds, too much blood.

            “Please don’t go,” Athos sobs, bending over his friend, his brother, his lover, a piece of him that he cannot exist without.  “Don’t leave me here alone, Porthos.  You promised that you would not leave me.” 

            “Don’t,” Porthos gurgles, blood choking him, drowning him, “don’t you dare…kill yourself…”

            Athos’ forehead lands on Porthos’ own, tears mingling with blood and sweat.  “Please,” he whispers.  “Please.” 

            “I love…” but the light is gone and Porthos is heavy in his arms.

            Athos doesn’t know how long he stays there.  The tears stop, but he’s bleeding out from a wound that he can’t see, a yawning black hole that not even the finest of wines will be able to fill.  Someone tries to take the bodies from him, but he screams and bites and kicks and finally they leave.  And he’s alone under the stars, where they all were two nights ago, tangled limbs covered in sweat and the most glorious of sins.  Now they’re entwined again, but where there should have been heaving breaths and sweet release there is just…this. 

            “Athos, please,” someone pleads with him.  “Please.” He thinks it might be D’Artangan, thinks that he should maybe reassure him, but there is nothing left to reassure him with.  “Please get up.” How strange, this pleading, an echo of his own cries. 

            “Let him go, son,” this voice older, worn.  Their Captain. He should get up. But the weight of his brothers (his soul) is heavy and he doesn’t have the strength any more.

            An old woman comes in the night.  Almost all of the bodies have been picked up, prepared for their final rest.  Whether she is looking for valuables among the wreckage or herbs in the night, Athos doesn’t care.  He can’t.

            “Poor boy,” she cackles. “Given so much you have.”

            He thinks that she may be mocking him, and the words should cause him to get up, defend his honor.

            “Many lives you have, you silly boy.  But none are easy. None are simple. Doomed you are to suffer, such is the mark on you…but this…this you have.”  She gestures to them, entangled on the ground.  The blood has turned cold and tacky, glued them together in some places.  Athos thinks that he will bathe them before they are laid to rest.  If only he could get up.  “To you I give the gift of memory.”  Her lips are warm against his frozen brow.  “To them as well.  You may not always be together, but stay strong with the knowledge that they are there. That they are looking for you child. Three parts of the same soul.”

            Three parts of the same soul.

            Michael takes what little clothes he has, throws them in his father’s old rucksack, and walks out the door. His mother is screaming at him to turn around.  “Don’t you leave me here with him!” But he sees now what she has created.  Cannot live in ignorance any more.  The rain has stopped and despite the biting wind, he’s never felt surer about anything than those first steps onto the broken and peeling asphalt.

            Michael lives on the streets. He does odd jobs as he makes his way north and then east.  He discovers skills he did not know he had and other things surface.

            He smells mud and rain and blood in the trenches.

            He flies a plane filled with bombs, watches the destruction below.

            He teaches a college course on classic French literature.

            Spends a lifetime on a boat fishing for lobsters, another running the stables on an old English estate.

            There are times where they find each other.  They aren’t always pleasant, but at least they are together.

            Lifetimes they are apart are bad.

            Sometimes he sees others that he knows.  Once, Treville is his high school principal.  Constance works as a secretary at his law firm in the 1920s.  D’Artangan becomes a news anchor.  He hates when this happens, because it is almost a sure sign that he’s missed them in time, that he’ll have to wait another lifetime to try and find them.  He often contemplates suicide then, but remembers a promise hundreds of years old and refrains. He’ll kill himself passively instead, through drink or drugs, by volunteering for the front lines, hoping that next time, next time they’ll be there. 

            The worst are the times where he finds them too late.  Porthos is old and has days to live.  Aramis hit by an intoxicated driver, just when he was crossing the street to meet him. Sometimes he thinks it would be better to not remember, but he would not give up a second of time spent with them. Will value every touch, every look, every breath. 

            He finally remembers the number of his Swiss bank account, the password he needs to access the cash. He waits 24-hours for the verification process, and gets his first sum wired to him.  The account was set up just a lifetime ago, before he went off to Vietnam, before he was poisoned by Agent Orange and died (not the first time) alone (also not the first) and painfully (something he’d made a habit of). Wonders how he ended up with two lives in the United States in a row (is glad he isn’t in Russia this time around, or Cambodia, or someplace with mosquitos and malaria), but doesn’t really care. 

            With money in hand he checks into the nearest motel under the name Michael (even if he calls himself Athos in his head—of all the names he’s had this is the only one that matters), and takes a lukewarm shower.  There isn’t enough water pressure and the room smells like cigarette smoke, but there’s a mattress and blankets and pillows.  He’s had far worse. 

            The bed vibrates for a quarter and he pops in three, hoping it will help him puzzle out next steps.

            Sometimes, after he remembers, Athos will go to school.  Get a degree and a job.  He was a lawyer once. Hated every second of it.

            Other times, he’s been drafted into service.  He’s fought in both World Wars—once wearing a British Flag, another, French—has seen Vietnam. Remembers the blood of the French Revolution, once had a head roll from a guillotine and land at his feet. Athos is a good fighter. But he’s tired this time around. He’s missed Porthos and Aramis since the late1800s, some time after what was known as the Civil War—this last life, the one where Aramis was killed by the car, the one where Porthos’ picture was in the paper after his unit was listed as MIA, doesn’t count because he didn’t get to touch, feel, smell, kiss, taste them.  It’s been close to 100 years since he’s seen them and he’s going crazy now.  Doesn’t know if he can make it from one second to the next because he’s starting to fall apart. These past 100 years have been horrendous, full of death and suffering.  He’s made new friends only to lose them, watched people suffer and been unable to stop it.

            But they promised to find him and he promised not to kill himself (so tempting, so tempting to have a few years where he doesn’t KNOW), so he has to decide what to do next.

            There’s a Cold War on. Maybe he could be a spy.

            The exhaustion is eating at him…he’s falling apart.  Maybe he should just go back to Paris and bury himself in wine.  It’s a solid plan.  As good as any.  This time around, Athos is going to ignore the world and its problems.  This time, he’s going home. 

            Except France has too many memories and is too glaringly different.  Places where fields used to lay are now buildings.  Paris has expanded and swallowed the fertile land around it. The clean river he once tried to end his life in is muddy and brown, full of pollution and poison.

            So Athos spends a year traveling Europe, hoping, maybe, that he’ll run into them. He doesn’t.  Isn’t really surprised.  But every night he falls apart a little more.

            By the time he is 20 Athos is ancient and broken.  One night, he picks up a bottle, crawls in, and doesn’t crawl back out.

            Drinking isn’t as effective as it was Before (the Musketeers), but he hadn’t needed it as much After (when he had them to hold him down and fill the empty spaces). The pain he was trying to bury then seems like nothing compared to this, because he’s pretty sure that at this rate, he’ll never find them again. 

            Athos buys a Ferrari (his family fortune, coupled with several lifetimes of earnings, means that he may never have to work again—he certainly isn’t working this time around) and a bunch of land in the Mid-Western United States.  He builds an estate, buys dozens of horses, rides them more often then he drives the car (because he doesn’t really like driving—but thinks that Aramis would love it) and is anti-social to everyone in the small town ten miles away. 

            Dreams come all the time now, spanning hundreds of years in one night.  Every morning Athos has to wake up, and try to remember who he is. It starts with the Lord’s Pray, an Our Father whispered into the dawn.

            “I am Athos,” he murmurs.

            “I am Thomas’ brother,” he’s had other brothers and sisters, but this is the only thing that seems true. Sometimes, on his more introspective days, Athos wonders if there were lives before that first one that he did not remember.  Thinks that he does not want to know. 

            “I am a Musketeer,” because that is where it all begins.  Nothing else afterwards has made any sense.

            “They promised that they would be there.”  And then the hard part, because he took the sword out of the vault when he was traveling around Europe. Oils it every night. “I promised not to give up.” ( _To kill yourself, you coward_ ).

            Some days this isn’t enough, and he stays in bed, repeating it again and again, because this time around something has snapped inside of him and it is taking everything he has to just remember.  He wakes up screaming in an empty mansion, had warned the housekeeper long ago to stay away if he was yelling, and still thinks that he is in a Russian labor camp. No one comes that time, and Athos dies hungry and alone.

            He remembers his parents selling him once for twenty pounds and a loaf of bread to the whorehouse down by the Thames.  Athos can’t remember the year, because he was only ten or eleven when he died that time from one beating too many.

            There are days where Athos is certain that he’s in a POW camp in Korea, others where he’s under water in a submarine and he wants to get out out up to the surface NOW.

            There are more days, worse days, where he curls up in his closet and shuts the door, falling slowly apart.

            On the good days, the ones where he remembers who he is, “Thomas’ brother, Musketeer, I promised”, and maybe even when and where he is, Athos rides the horses over his twenty sprawling acres and doesn’t come home until nightfall.

            On the best days, the ones where he thinks maybe this time he’ll find them, Athos plays the violin that he bought several lifetimes ago, winds a tune to call for the missing pieces of his soul, imagines Aramis singing in the dark as he was wont to do on the rare occasion Athos would play.  Athos would play, Aramis would sing, and Porthos would clean and oil his leather in the dying firelight.  Afterwards, Porthos would use that oil on Athos and Aramis’ voice would be humming deep in his throat and Athos would use his fingers to play a different instrument, but one no less beautiful.  But these days are few and far between and they keep getting further apart.

            So Athos turns 21 in 1988 and doesn’t even know that it is his birthday, because today is a really, really bad day (one where he watches them die again and again, where he begs Porthos to hold on, to stay, to not leave him), so he’s buried himself in the closet but his fingers are itching to hold his sword, to run himself through and end it all. 

            The housekeeper doesn’t know that he is in the closet.

            He can hear her enter, turn on the radio and start fixing his sheets.  She has an obsession with that box that plays music. But Athos finds most of the music loud and grating, too confusing, too many sounds and words. So he buries his head between his knees, locks his arms over his head, and just tries to breathe.

            A song he hasn’t heard yet is attempting to make its way into the closet, past his arms and knees, through his ears and into his brain.  And despite himself, Athos cocks his head, lets it in. 

_If you need a friend,_

_don't look to a stranger,_

_You know in the end,_

_I'll always be there._

            He sees Aramis, the anger in his eyes at the thought that Athos would seek relief anywhere else.  Hears the promise of redemption on their lips. His grip on reality is slipping.  Aramis is in front of him, chapped lips pressing on his forehead, Porthos is behind, slowly devouring the base of his neck, strong arms holding him in place, never letting him go.

 

_And when you're in doubt,_

_and when you're in danger,_

_Take a look all around,_

_and I'll be there._

 

            Athos is lost, awash in a haze of pain. He’s lost them and he’ll never get them back.  Has spent more lifetimes than he deserves trying to find them.  And failing again and again. Athos remembers hanging by his fingertips at the edge of a cliff, the strong hands that lifted him to safety. Remembers the nights spent sending himself into oblivion, and the shoulders that propped him up. Remembers the quiet and the dark and the sound of Aramis’ warm voice filling the night…

            Athos’ head lifts.

 

_I'm sorry but I'm just thinking of the right words to say, (I promise)_

_I know they don't sound the way I planned them to be. (I promise)_

_But if you wait around a while, I'll make you fall for me,_

_I promise, I promise you I will._

            It was never supposed to be what it was. A way to find relief with trusted friends turned into something more.  Something inseparable. It was Porthos who had told them his intentions, who had eventually won Athos and Aramis over…

            Who made them fall in love.

            He misses the next verses, feels tears running down his cheeks, mourning the depth of his loss.

_And if I had to walk the world, I'd make you fall for me,_

_I promise you, I promise you I will._

            “If we have to walk the world to find you, we will…” It’s Porthos’ words.

            It’s Aramis’ whiskey warm voice.

            Athos nearly gives the housekeeper a heart attack as he flies out of the closet.  His hair is a mess, he hasn’t showered in days.  Stubble has turned into beard which has turned into a tangled mess and tear tracks streak his face. 

            “Who is this?” he asks roughly. “Who is singing this?”

            “It’s a band…from Britain?”

            Ten hours later he’s on a plane, flying across the ocean.  He hates flying more than driving, but he has to get there yesterday and would suffer any number of tortures to get here.  Already has.

            Forty-eight hours after that he has concert tickets in hand, is fighting his way through the crowd to a stage filled with sound equipment and electric instruments and…

            “ARAMIS!” he screams over the chanting of the crowd.

            The man on vocals continues to croon into his microphone. 

            “ARAMIS!!!” he’s jumping the barrier, trying to climb on stage.  A burly security guard in black tries to stop him, ends up ass over heels on the ground. Two more come at him but a voice cuts over the screams, deep and warm and enough to make his knees buckle.

            “Let him through.” 

            Legs give out and arms are around his waist, but he can’t turn around.  Because if it isn’t him, if this is all some trick of his imagination…if he’s really stuck for countless more decades without them…

            “I promise,” comes the whisper in his ear. Stubble tickles the back of his neck and a sob wrenches from his throat.  “No, no,” the voice is panicked, hands are turning him, and there is Porthos, blurry through all those tears, but it is undoubtedly him. Athos has never cried so much in all his lives, but he has irrevocably shattered now, can’t seem to pull himself together… “Shh, shh, it’s alright, I’ve got you. We’re here now, we’re here now.”

            “I wanted to,” he confesses into Porthos’ shoulder. “I nearly killed myself this time. But I promised.”

            “You did good, Athos,” and to hear his name, his true name…

            Porthos starts to pull back but Athos latches on. “Don’t leave me.”

            “I won’t, I won’t,” Porthos murmurs. “Come on. Aramis’ll be done soon. And then we’ll never be apart again.”

            Athos doubts that.  Knows that there are worse futures ahead. But maybe there are better ones to. For now, he just wants to stay here, in this moment, forever.  “Promise?”

            Unwittingly, Porthos speaks the words as Aramis sings them, “ _I promise you.”_

And to Athos, so broken and desperate, it is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed it.
> 
> Let me know what you think and feel free to play with it! I'd love to read a piece by someone else that ties in--or is similar (because I'm clearly craving something off the wall). And if you have any fic recs, I'd love to explore them! Just shoot me a PM or leave a comment so I can find you!
> 
> Thanks!!!!


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